Staff reunite at site of California massacre

• In the San Bernardino offices of the Inland Regional Center, Christmas did not come after a couple massacred 14 people at a holiday party a month ago.

Tinsel still festoons cubicles. A small tree with presents sits undisturbed. A sign-up sheet to bring in food remains empty of names.

Few of its 600 employees have gone to the office since, other than making a brief visit to gather personal belongings a week after the Dec. 2 terror attack. On Monday they return.

While many have continued to work, visiting the homes of autistic children and mentally disabled adults, they haven’t been together in the place where everything froze once police officers whisked them away.

Amid the investigation and cleanup, the campus has been locked behind a chain link fence wrapped in green mesh. Within that perimeter, in one corner, is a second fence.

It seals the conference centre that San Bernardino County’s health department was renting for a holiday luncheon when the two attackers began their assault. A county restaurant inspector targeting his co-workers was joined by his wife in killing 14 and wounding dozens. The FBI says the attackers were motivated by radical Islamist beliefs.

The conference centre will not reopen Monday, and it’s not clear when it might.

For now, the act of reuniting elsewhere on campus will be a huge step forward for Inland Regional Center staff. They miss the friendly faces, the hallway conversations.

“That’s what I’m hearing from them: ‘ We want to be together again. We want to be back at work,’ ” said Lavinia Johnson, the centre’s executive director.

The plan for Monday morning is, after a welcome and some food in the lounges, to do what social workers and counsellors do best — sit and talk, she said. After that, it’s back to work. Professional counsellors will be on hand for those who want them.

“Our goal is to help people help themselves. And that’s pretty much the same strategy that we want to take with our staff,” said the centre’s associate executive director, Kevin Urtz.

Both Johnson and Urtz have worked more than 25 years at the centre, which, with nearly 31,000 disabled clients in the working- class sprawl east of Los Angeles, is the largest of 21 such facilities in California. It is a vital community resource in a place where about one-third of households live below the poverty line.

Johnson and Urtz expect staff to be resilient. They thanked police personnel and expressed condolences for the families of the slain.

But while people want to move ahead, Urtz said he doesn’t expect to ever put that day fully behind him.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to just, you know,” he said, with his voice trailing off. “No, it’s too big.”